No Evil

This is a truism, and I'm not sure it's a particularly useful one at that, but much of the "evil" in the world is perpetrated in the name of combating the "evil" in the world.

I would admit that it rarely looks that way; it's hard to make the case that most murders or assaults are intended to make the world a better place. But I suspect that the second Socratic Paradox, namely: "no man who believes that an action is evil does it willingly--on the contrary, all the actions that a man does willingly he does with a view to achieving some good" is an accurate assessment of human action.

So the problem becomes the different understandings of what constitutes "some good." It's a bone of contention between myself and some of my more religious acquaintances. I am of the opinion that human beings are not willfully ignoring some objectively correct moral code, but that people see morality differently, and a number of conflicts are about people not making that distinction.